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      Emmanuel Macron Defeats Marine Le Pen for Second Term as French President

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      The result was a relief to allies in Europe and Washington wary of a far-right challenger who was hostile to the European Union and NATO.PARIS — Emmanuel Macron won a second term as president of France, triumphing on Sunday over Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, after a campaign where his promise of stability prevailed over the temptation of an extremist lurch.Projections at the close of voting, which are generally reliable, showed Mr. Macron, a centrist, gaining 58.5 percent of the vote to Ms. Le Pen’s 41.5 percent. His victory was much narrower than in 2017, when the margin was 66.1 percent to 33.9 percent for Ms. Le Pen, but wider than appeared likely two weeks ago.Speaking to a crowd massed on the Champ de Mars in front of a twinkling Eiffel Tower, a solemn Mr. Macron said his was a victory for “a more independent France and a stronger Europe.” He added: “Our country is riddled with so many doubts, so many divisions. We will have to be strong, but nobody will be left by the side of the road.”Ms. Le Pen conceded defeat in her third attempt to become president, but bitterly criticized the “brutal and violent methods” of Mr. Macron, without explaining what she meant. She vowed to fight on to secure a large number of representatives in legislative elections in June, declaring that “French people have this evening shown their desire for a strong counter power to Emmanuel Macron.”Mr. Macron addressed supporters in front of the Eiffel Tower after his victory.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesAt a critical moment in Europe, with fighting raging in Ukraine after the Russian invasion, France rejected a candidate hostile to NATO, to the European Union, to the United States, and to its fundamental values that hold that no French citizens should be discriminated against because they are Muslim.Jean-Yves Le Drian, the foreign minister, said the result reflected “the mobilization of French people for the maintenance of their values and against a narrow vision of France.”The French do not generally love their presidents, and none had succeeded in being re-elected since 2002, let alone by a 17-point margin. Mr. Macron’s unusual achievement in securing five more years in power reflects his effective stewardship over the Covid-19 crisis, his rekindling of the economy, and his political agility in occupying the entire center of the political spectrum.Ms. Le Pen, softening her image if not her anti-immigrant nationalist program, rode a wave of alienation and disenchantment to bring the extreme right closer to power than at any time since 1944. Her National Rally party has joined the mainstream, even if at the last minute many French people clearly voted for Mr. Macron to ensure that France not succumb to the xenophobic vitriol of the darker passages of its history.Ms. Le Pen is a longtime sympathizer with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whom she visited at the Kremlin during her last campaign in 2017. She would almost certainly have pursued policies that weakened the united allied front to save Ukraine from Russia’s assault; offered Mr. Putin a breach to exploit in Europe; and undermined the European Union, whose engine has always been a joint Franco-German commitment to it.Marine Le Pen conceded to Mr. Macron, but bitterly criticized his “brutal and violent methods” without explaining what she meant.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesIf Brexit was a blow to unity, a French nationalist quasi-exit, as set out in Ms. Le Pen’s proposals, would have left the European Union on life support. That, in turn, would have crippled an essential guarantor of peace on the continent in a volatile moment.Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, declared that Mr. Macron’s win was “a vote of confidence in Europe.” Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, congratulated the French leader and called France “one of our closest and most important allies.”Mr. Scholz and two other European leaders had taken the unusual step last week of making clear the importance of a vote against Ms. Le Pen in an opinion article in the daily newspaper Le Monde. The letter was a reflection of the anxiety in European capitals and Washington that preceded the vote.“It is the choice between a democratic candidate, who believes that France is stronger in a powerful and autonomous European Union, and a far-right candidate, who openly sides with those who attack our freedom and our democracy,” they wrote.Mr. Macron’s second victory felt different from his first. Five years ago, he was a 39-year-old wunderkind bursting on the French political scene with a promise to bury sterile left-right divisions and build a more just, equal, open and dynamic society. He organized a massive celebration in the main courtyard of the Louvre to mark the dawn of a new political era in France.Sunday night, given the war in Europe, he asked for sobriety from his supporters. As Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” the European hymn, played (but much more softly than in 2017), he walked onto the Champ de Mars holding the hand of his wife, Brigitte. Children surrounded the couple; the choreography conveyed simplicity and humility.Supporters of Mr. Macron celebrated on the Champ de Mars.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesMr. Macron has often been criticized for an aloofness bordering on arrogance during his first term.“We avoided a certain form of violence. I am relieved,” said Eric Maus, 64, a Macron supporter. “But I feel like I am handing my daughter an uncertain world where the extreme right scores so high.”Mr. Macron succeeded in spurring growth, slashing unemployment and instilling a start-up tech culture, but was unable to address growing inequality or simmering anger among the alienated and the struggling in areas of urban blight and rural remoteness. Societal divisions sharpened as incomes stagnated, prices rose and factories moved abroad.As a result, Mr. Macron’s political capital is more limited, even if his clear victory has saved France from a dangerous tilt toward xenophobic nationalism and given him momentum ahead of the June legislative elections.Still, many of the 7.7 million voters who had supported the left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the presidential election on April 10 voted only reluctantly for Mr. Macron to keep Ms. Le Pen from power. Assina Channa, a Muslim of Algerian descent voting in the suburb of Saint-Denis north of Paris, said, “Nothing is going to change but I had no choice.”Ms. Le Pen had proposed a ban on the Muslim head scarf and has regularly equated Islam with violence in the country with the largest Muslim community in western Europe. “At least he doesn’t threaten us like she does,” Ms. Channa said.A polling station in Saint-Denis.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesMr. Macron acknowledged that “many of our compatriots voted for me today not to support my ideas but to form a dam against the extreme right.” He thanked them and said “I am now entrusted with their sense of duty, their attachment to the Republic and their respect for the differences expressed these past weeks.”Some 28 percent of the electorate abstained, three percentage points higher than in 2017, and it appeared that more than 13 million people had voted for Ms. Le Pen and the extreme right. “The anger and the disagreements that led my compatriots to vote for this project must also find an answer,” Mr. Macron said.It was a speech not of soaring rhetoric but of sober realism, almost at times contrition, reflecting his recognition of a starkly divided France and perhaps also his inattention to those for whom life has been hardest.The dreams of radical change of 2017 have been supplanted by fears of political confrontation over the summer, in part because the dislike of Mr. Macron among his opponents is strong, and in part because the legislative elections in June could result in a National Assembly less pliant to his will.Constantly adjusting his positions, extending the circle of his allies and refining his ideas, Mr. Macron has proved himself a consummate politician, suffocating any would-be moderate challengers. He engineered the near total demise of the center-left Socialist Party and the center-right Republicans, the two political forces at the heart of postwar French politics. It was a remarkable feat.Supporters of Mr. Macron celebrating in Paris on Sunday.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesBut there was a price to pay for all this. The old structure of French politics has collapsed, and it is less clear how the violent conflicts of society can be mediated.Those conflicts have become more acute as anger has grown in the parts of France that have felt neglected, even forgotten, by the elites in major cities. By addressing these concerns, and promising a series of tax cuts to help people cope with rising prices for gas and electricity, Ms. Le Pen built an effective campaign.Her message, for some voters, was that she would care for and protect them while their president seemed to have other concerns. But her nationalist message also resonated among people angered by undocumented immigrants entering the country and seeking scapegoats for the country’s problems.The president’s problems have reflected both his personality and political choices. His highly personalized top-down style of government owed more to Bonaparte than to the democratic opening he had said he would bring to the French presidential system. His attempts to force march Europe toward a vision of “strategic autonomy” backed by its own integrated military has met resistance in the countries like Poland that are most attached to America as a European power.Emerging from the moderate left of the political system, and supported by many Socialists five years ago, Mr. Macron veered to the right both in his initial economic policy and in a much-criticized decision to confront what he called “Islamist separatism” by shutting down several mosques and Islamic associations — often on flimsy legal grounds.He judged that he had more to gain on the right than to fear on the fragmented left of the political spectrum in a country whose psyche has been deeply marked by several Islamist terrorist attacks since 2015. In a sense, his victory proved him correct, the master of a broad web of adjustable allegiances that left his opponents floundering.Aida Alami More

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      Marine Le Pen’s Message Finds a Strong Audience in the North

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      HARDECOURT-AUX-BOIS, France — Marine Le Pen spent the last two days of her campaign in the deindustrialized, economically struggling areas in the north of France that, along with a Mediterranean stretch in the south, form her strongholds.Exhorting her core supporters to vote on Sunday, Ms. Le Pen held events in the Somme department, home to towns and villages where her attacks against her rival, Emmanuel Macron, as an “arrogant” president full of “disdain” for ordinary people resonated powerfully.“To me, Emmanuel Macron is a president who has made the rich richer,” said Gaëtan François, 40, a construction tractor operator and a village councilor, outside the City Hall in Hardecourt-aux-Bois. “Marine Le Pen is the only one to defend the workers.”In Hardecourt-aux-Bois, a village of 85 people in the Somme, only three people voted for Mr. Macron in the first round earlier this month. Ms. Le Pen got 78 percent of the votes, her highest score nationwide.The village, like the rest of the region, has drifted rightward in the past decade.Maurice Clément, 82, a retired truck driver, said he had voted for Socialists most of his life. In 2017, he voted for Ms. Le Pen in the first round, but for Mr. Macron in the runoff because he was worried about the extreme right.This time, he had no such worries. Mr. Macron’s policies, he said, had plunged France in a “hole,” citing the record government debt accumulated during his presidency. He was angry about Mr. Macron’s proposal to raise the retirement age to 65 from 62 as part of his plans to overhaul the pension system. For those who had done hard manual labor all their lives, retiring at 65 was the equivalent of retiring in “crutches,” he said.Ms. Le Pen, he said, “is the only choice.”About 24 miles away, Ham, a town of about 5,000 people, has also shifted rightward in recent years. In the 2012 presidential election, people in Ham voted like the rest of the nation by choosing François Hollande, the Socialist Party candidate, over the center-right Nicolas Sarkozy.But in 2017, Ham picked Ms. Le Pen over Mr. Macron. Ms. Le Pen won 56 percent of the votes in Ham, compared with only 34 percent nationwide.On Sunday, Ms. Le Pen was expected to handily defeat Mr. Macron in Ham once again. In the first round of voting two weeks ago, she had 41 percent of the votes, with Mr. Macron getting only 24 percent.Beyond Ms. Le Pen’s focus on the working class, her longstanding tough talk on crime and immigration appealed to voters like Hubert Bekaert, 68, a retired optician.“I’m sick of using taxpayer money to house terrorists in prison,” he said, adding that he wanted the death penalty restored. “Marine Le Pen is the only one who’s tough on crime.” More

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      As Marine Le Pen Moves Closer to French Presidency, Putin Ties Persist

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      As elections approach Sunday, the far-right candidate is linked to the Russian president by a web of financial ties and a history of support that has hardly dimmed despite the war in Ukraine.PARIS — When Europe’s far-right leaders gathered in Madrid in January, they had no problem finding unity on the issues they hold dear, whether cracking down on immigrants or upholding “European Christian ideals.” But as Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border, they were divided on one issue: the threat posed by President Vladimir V. Putin.Marine Le Pen, the extreme-right challenger for the French presidency, objected to a paragraph in the final statement calling for European solidarity to confront “Russian military actions on the eastern border of Europe.” Even in a gathering of illiberal nationalists, she was an outlier in her fealty to Mr. Putin.Now, on her campaign website, the leaders’ statement appears with that paragraph cut in an unacknowledged change to the text. This little subterfuge is consistent with an embrace of Mr. Putin so complete that even his ravaging of Ukraine has hardly diminished it.Over the past decade, Ms. Le Pen’s party, the National Rally, formerly the National Front, has borrowed millions from a Russian bank, and Ms. Le Pen has supported Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, as well as his incendiary meddling that year in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where just this week Russia redoubled its offensive.Her support for Mr. Putin is one thing in a time of peace and another in a time of war. Russia, a nuclear power, has invaded a European state, and Ms. Le Pen is closer than ever to her cherished goal of becoming president of France, having narrowed the gap with President Emmanuel Macron before the decisive round of the election on Sunday.Supporters of Ms. Le Pen at a campaign rally in Stiring-Wendel, France, on April 1. She has come closer to Mr. Macron in polls as a decisive election round nears.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesWith polls showing Ms. Le Pen gaining about 44.5 percent of the vote to Mr. Macron’s 55.5 percent, she is within range of the shocks that produced Brexit and Donald J. Trump’s victory in 2016. As in Britain and the United States, alienation and economic hardship have fed a French readiness to gamble on nationalist dreams.If Ms. Le Pen wins, which is not likely but possible, her victory will almost certainly fracture the allied unity engineered by President Biden in an attempt to defeat Mr. Putin. It would hand Mr. Putin by far his most important ally in Europe, one he could leverage in his aims to divide Europe from the United States and fracture Europe’s decades-old project of unity.France, a core member of the European Union and NATO, is suddenly the possible soft underbelly of the West.Julien Nocetti, a Russia expert at the French Institute of International Relations, said there was “a complete ideological alignment between Putin and Le Pen” — one that would be deeply worrying to France’s American and European allies.The Ukraine war has caused Ms. Le Pen to pivot a little by saying Mr. Putin crossed “a red line” with the invasion, but she still says her foreign-policy priority is a rapprochement with Russia once the fighting stops.Bodies being loaded onto a truck in Bucha, Ukraine, where evidence of Russian atrocities mounted. Ms. Le Pen said that Mr. Putin crossed “a red line” with the invasion but also that she will seek a rapprochement with Russia.Daniel Berehulak for The New York TimesSince Ms. Le Pen, 53, took over the leadership of her party in 2011, she has only deepened its Putin predilection, making four trips to Moscow and one to Crimea. She would support sanctions against Russia, she says, but not cutting off imports of Russian oil and gas, which she has equated with economic death for France.“We have to think of our people,” she said in a recent TV interview, a position consistent with the strong focus on pocketbook issues that has propelled her campaign. The majority of French people are more focused on getting to the end of the month than getting Russia out of Ukraine.Certainly, Ms. Le Pen vaunted her connection with Mr. Putin until he went to war on Feb. 24. She included a photo of herself shaking hands with him in her election brochure as evidence of her “international stature.” This handout disappeared abruptly from view after the Russian invasion.The photo was taken at the Kremlin on March 24, 2017. That was less than five weeks before the first round of the last presidential election, in which Mr. Macron defeated Ms. Le Pen by 66.1 percent to 33.9 percent. The National Rally leader said then that she would immediately review lifting “unjust” sanctions against Russia if elected.As for Mr. Putin, he said with a knowing smirk that Russia did “not want to influence events in any way.”Shopping at a supermarket in Livry-Gargan, Paris, in December. Most French voters are more concerned about the economy than the Ukraine war.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesJean-Maurice Ripert, the French ambassador in Moscow from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that a fellow European ambassador, a close friend, had asked the Russian leader after the French election why he had backed Ms. Le Pen.“Because I had been told she was going to win,” Mr. Putin said.Certainly that is what he wanted. Ms. Le Pen, committed to “equidistance” between great powers and hostile to “America’s protectorate on European soil,” sees in Mr. Putin the defender of the nation-state, family and Christianity against border-eroding multilateralism and irreligious cultural decay.“It’s all about sovereignty,” said Marlène Laruelle, the French director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian studies at George Washington University. “The sovereign state against international organizations; the sovereign traditional family against L.G.B.T.Q. rights.”Then there is the money. Unable to get a loan from French banks, Ms. Le Pen and several of her top aides scrambled for cash in Russia, accepting a 9.4 million euro loan, then $12.2 million, at a 6 percent interest rate, from the First Czech-Russian Bank in September 2014. It was supposed to be repaid by 2019.A branch of the First Czech-Russian Bank in Moscow, before it collapsed in 2016. Ms. Le Pen received millions in loans from the bank.Dmitry Serebryakov/TASS/Alamy Live NewsWallerand de Saint-Just, who was long the National Rally’s treasurer before leaving the position last year, negotiated the deal in Moscow. In a written answer to a question as to why French banks had refused any loan to the National Rally, he said “My experience with the six big French banking groups is that they obey orders from the political executive.”But given the lack of transparency and accountability in Russia’s financial sector — and Mr. Putin’s sway over it in his pay-to-play system — the sum has long raised hard questions of just how beholden Ms. Le Pen actually is to the Russian president, and whether some of her outspoken backing for him has been a consequence.I asked Ms. Le Pen this month at a news conference whether the outstanding loan did not create at least the impression of dependence on Russia, a liability for any future president?“Absolutely not,” she said. “I am totally independent of any link to any power.”In her current campaign, again unable to get a loan from a French bank, Ms. Le Pen turned to Hungary, where Viktor Orban, the anti-immigrant Hungarian prime minister, has been in power for 12 years. A Hungarian bank has now lent the National Rally another $11.4 million, so if she were to win she would be indebted to both Mr. Putin and Mr. Orban.Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, center, attending a meeting of far-right and conservative leaders in Madrid, in January.Oscar Del Pozo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAlready her backing of Mr. Putin has been borderline fawning. Ms. Le Pen visited Moscow and Crimea in June 2013; Moscow in April 2014; and Moscow again in May 2015. She was received by the president of the Duma, the lower chamber of Russia’s Parliament, during the first of these visits, and sprinkled her Russian sojourns with pro-Putin remarks.In 2013, she blamed the European Union for a new “Cold War on Russia.” In 2015, also while in Moscow, she criticized France’s pro-American stance and suggested this would change “in 2017 with Marine Le Pen as president.” In 2021, she recommended Russia’s uncertain Sputnik vaccine for the coronavirus, saying “our anti-Russian ideology should not ruin our capacity to vaccinate our fellow citizens.”The 2014 visit came at a particularly delicate moment, given the Crimea annexation. It was one of several demonstrations of support for Mr. Putin from prominent members of Ms. Le Pen’s party who visited Crimea that year, and the Donbas, the Ukrainian region where clashes kindled by Moscow had begun.Among them was Aymeric Chauprade, her former top diplomatic adviser, who went to Crimea to observe the dubious March 2014 referendum that massively backed the Russian annexation. A United Nations General Assembly resolution declared the vote invalid.“It was the West that began changing European borders with Kosovo’s independence in 2008,” Mr. Chauprade, who has since left the National Rally, said in an interview. “There was an openness to accepting invitations from Russia, a good atmosphere.”Russian troops guarded a Ukrainian marine base in Crimea as Mr. Putin moved to annex the peninsula in March 2014. Le Pen has visited Moscow and Crimea and made remarks that were supportive of Russia.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesMediapart, a French investigative news website, was the first to expose the Russian loan to the National Rally in September 2014. In an earlier interview with Mediapart, Mr. Chauprade said visits to the Donbas that year and in 2015 by Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a former National Rally member of the European Parliament, had been a “quid pro quo” for the loan.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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      Marine Le Pen Proposes Ban on Muslim Women Wearing Head Scarves

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      Marine Le Pen, the far-right contender, has proposed a ban on Muslim women wearing head scarves in public.PARIS — A Muslim woman in a blue and white hijab confronted Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential candidate, as she made her way through a crowd in the southern town of Pertuis last week. “What is the head scarf doing in politics?” the woman demanded.Ms. Le Pen, a nationalist with an anti-immigrant agenda, has vowed to ban the wearing of the head scarf in public if she is elected in the second round of voting next Sunday. She says that it is “an Islamist uniform,” or a sign of adherence to an extremist, anti-Western interpretation of the Muslim faith.The woman who argued with Ms. Le Pen was having none of this. Her choice to wear a head scarf was made, she said, “when I was an older woman,” as a sign of “being a grandmother.” Ms. Le Pen insisted that in many French neighborhoods women who do not wear a veil are “separated, isolated and judged.” In the country with the largest Muslim population in western Europe, what a woman wears on her head matters. France has a troubled relationship with Islam because of its colonial history in Algeria and several jihadist terror attacks in recent years. As Ms. Le Pen and President Emmanuel Macron confront each other in a tight race, religious freedom, particularly for the Muslims who make up about 8 percent of the population, has emerged as a pivotal issue.Mr. Macron, who has called Ms. Le Pen’s plan “an extremist project,” has nevertheless angered some members of the Muslim community, mainly through legislation designed to combat what he calls “Islamist separatism.” That law, passed last year, has been used to close some mosques and Islamic associations accused of fostering radicalism. It was designed in part to draw right-wing voters to his centrist camp.Mr. Macron, whose lead in polls has widened slightly over the past week to 53.5 percent against Ms. Le Pen’s 46.5 percent, had his own confrontation with a young French woman wearing a hijab during a campaign stop in Strasbourg last week.“Are you a feminist?” he asked. “Are you for the equality of women and men?”President Emmanuel Macron of France at a rally in Marseille on Saturday.Afp Contributor#Afp/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen the woman answered yes to both questions, and said her head scarf was chosen, not imposed, Mr. Macron, clearly alluding to Ms. Le Pen, said this was “the best answer to all the stupidity I keep hearing.”It was another example of Mr. Macron, who scarcely campaigned before the first round of voting on April 10, adjusting his message to appeal to blocs of voters who have felt betrayed by him over the past five years — the Muslim community and the left.In the first round, about 70 percent of French Muslims voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left candidate who was narrowly eliminated, according to a study by the Ifop polling institute. Where those votes now go matters.France is a secular republic and in theory a nondiscriminatory society where people are free to believe, or not, in any god they wish. But it finds itself in a fracturing debate over Islam. A growing Muslim presence is seen by the extreme-right as a mortal threat to French identity, and this view has gained a foothold in the political mainstream.Intensely attached to its model of a secular society, known as laïcité, which is supposed to subsume all men and women into the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship, France has been reluctant to acknowledge failures that have left many Muslim immigrants and their descendants in dismal housing projects on the periphery of big cities, feeling no viable French identity or future.Since 2011 it has been illegal to wear a face-covering niqab, or a burqa covering the entire body, in public. But there is no ban on the head scarf.French laws prohibit wearing ostentatious religious symbols — the head scarf is considered one — in schools. Civil servants are also barred from doing so on the job. Debate has raged over whether parents accompanying school trips should be allowed to wear head scarves, but attempts to stop them have failed.A woman in a head scarf in Marseille on Saturday ahead of a campaign appearance by Mr. Macron.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStrongly held French feelings about the equality of men and women, about secularism, and about its supposedly colorblind society lie behind the virulence of the discussion of these issues. So does unacknowledged or overt prejudice.Mr. Macron has accused Ms. Le Pen of undermining the principles of laïcité and the Constitution itself with the proposed head scarf ban. In an interview with Franceinfo radio last week, he said she would also have to ban the use of the “kippa, the cross and other religious symbols” in public or she would be discriminating among believers.Not so, Ms. Le Pen retorted in an interview with France Inter radio. “The head scarf is in reality an Islamist uniform, it is not a Muslim uniform, and that makes all the difference. It is the uniform of an ideology, not of a religion.”She continued: “This ban is not based on the concept of laïcité. It is based on the battle against Islamist ideologies.”However, Ms. Le Pen appeared to hedge a little on Sunday, saying that the issue is a “complex problem” and that her proposed ban would be debated in the National Assembly.Whether the ban would also apply to women choosing head scarves as fashion statements à la Audrey Hepburn is unclear.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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      In Call Before Jan. 6 Riot, a Plea to ‘Descend on the Capitol’

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      Days before Jan. 6, a onetime aide to Roger J. Stone Jr. told Trump backers to make lawmakers meeting to finalize the 2020 election results feel that “people are breathing down their necks.”One week before an angry mob stormed the Capitol, a communications expert named Jason Sullivan, a onetime aide to Roger J. Stone Jr., joined a conference call with a group of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters and made an urgent plea.After assuring his listeners that the 2020 election had been stolen, Mr. Sullivan told them that they had to go to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021 — the day that Congress was to meet to finalize the electoral count — and “descend on the Capitol,” according to a recording of the call obtained by The New York Times.While Mr. Sullivan claimed that he was “not inciting violence or any kind of riots,” he urged those on the call to make their presence felt at the Capitol in a way that would intimidate members of Congress, telling the group that they had to ensure that lawmakers inside the building “understand that people are breathing down their necks.”He also pledged that Mr. Trump was going to take action on his own; the president, he said, was going to impose a form of martial law on Jan. 6 and would not be leaving office.“Biden will never be in that White House,” Mr. Sullivan declared. “That’s my promise to each and every one of you.”Before Riot, Operative Urged Trump Supporters to ‘Descend on the Capitol’ on Jan. 6In a conference call days before the Jan. 6 attack, Jason Sullivan, a onetime aide to Roger J. Stone Jr., exhorted supporters of President Donald J. Trump to go to the Capitol that day and pressure lawmakers meeting to finalize the 2020 election results.The recording of the call, which took place on Dec. 30, 2020, emerged as the Justice Department has expanded its criminal investigation of the Capitol attack. It offers a glimpse of the planning that went on in the run-up to the storming of the Capitol and the mind-set of some of those who zeroed in on Jan. 6 as a kind of last stand for keeping Mr. Trump in office.It also reflects the complexities that federal prosecutors are likely to face as they begin the task of figuring out how much — or even whether — people involved in the political rallies that preceded the assault can be held accountable for the violence that erupted.After more than a year of focusing exclusively on rioters who took part in the storming of the Capitol, prosecutors have widened their gaze in recent weeks and have started to question whether those involved in encouraging protests — like the one that Mr. Sullivan was describing — can be held culpable for disrupting the work of Congress.Mr. Sullivan’s remarks during the call appeared to be an effort to motivate a group of people aggrieved by the election to take direct action against members of Congress on Jan. 6, presaging what Mr. Trump himself would say in a speech that day. While it remains unclear whether anyone on Mr. Sullivan’s call went on to join the mob that breached the Capitol, he seemed to be exhorting his listeners to apply unusual pressure on lawmakers just as they were overseeing the final count of Electoral College votes.In a statement provided by his lawyer, Mr. Sullivan played down the nature of the call, saying he had merely “shared some encouragement” with what he described as “people who all felt their votes had been disenfranchised in the 2020 elections.” Mr. Sullivan said he had been asked to participate in the call by a group of anti-vaccine activists — or what he called “health freedom advocate moms” — who were hosting “a small, permitted event” at the Capitol on Jan. 6.“I only promoted peaceful solutions where Americans could raise their voices and be heard as expressed in our First Amendment,” Mr. Sullivan said in the statement. “I in no way condone the violence of any protesters.”Still, in the recording of the call, Mr. Sullivan can be heard telling his listeners that the lawmakers inside the Capitol “need to feel pressure.”“If we make the people inside that building sweat and they understand that they may not be able to walk in the streets any longer if they do the wrong thing, then maybe they’ll do the right thing,” he said. “We have to put that pressure there.”As the Justice Department widens its inquiry, federal prosecutors are using a grand jury in Washington to gather information on political organizers, speakers and so-called V.I.P.s connected to a series of pro-Trump rallies after the 2020 election. One prominent planner of those rallies, Ali Alexander, received a subpoena from the grand jury and said last week that he intended to comply with its requests.In the run-up to Jan. 6, Mr. Alexander publicly discussed a pressure campaign against lawmakers that was meant to stop the final electoral count, saying he was working with Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama and Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona, all Republicans.“We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Mr. Alexander said in a since-deleted video on Periscope. The plan, he said, was to “change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”It is unclear if the Justice Department is aware of Mr. Sullivan’s conference call; the department declined to comment. The House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 was provided with a copy of the recording some months ago by the woman who made it, Staci Burk, a law student and Republican activist from Arizona.Shortly after the election, Ms. Burk became convinced that phony ballots had been flown in bulk into Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. She eventually submitted an anonymous affidavit concerning the ballots in an election fraud case filed in Federal District Court in Phoenix by the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: New DevelopmentsCard 1 of 5Debating a criminal referral. More

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      Macron Sets Out to Build a ‘Dam’ Against Le Pen. Can It Hold?

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      After Sunday’s vote, when nearly a third of ballots went to the extreme right, a united front of mainstream voters looked more precarious than ever. PARIS — A day after Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, emerged as his challenger for the final round of France’s presidential election in less than two weeks, President Emmanuel Macron immediately set about on Monday to build the “dam.”Dams are the mainstream French voters who, time and again, have put political differences aside in the second round and voted for anyone but a Le Pen in a so-called “Republican front” to deny the far right the presidency.But after Sunday’s first round, when 32 percent of French voters supported candidates on the extreme right — a record — the dam may be more precarious than ever.Mr. Macron, widely criticized for a listless campaign, moved quickly Monday to shore it up, directly challenging Ms. Le Pen and her party, the National Rally, in the economically depressed north where she dominated Sunday.In Denain, a city won by Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Macron spoke of the worries of the youth in Denain and other social issues. He tried to remind voters of the extremist roots of Ms. Le Pen’s party, referring to it by its old name, the National Front.At a campaign stop of her own in a rural area, Yonne, Ms. Le Pen said that the dam was a dishonest strategy to win an election, adding that “it’s a way to save yourself when you don’t deserve it.’’In a triumphant speech against the majestic backdrop of the Louvre Museum five years ago, Mr. Macron had launched his presidency by pledging to unite the French so that there would be “no reason at all to vote for the extremes.’’But in addition to Ms. Le Pen’s second-place finish, with 23 percent of the vote, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist veteran, won 22 percent of Sunday’s votes to finish a strong third. Mr. Mélenchon’s supporters — split in their attitudes toward Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen — could now help determine the election’s final outcome on April 24.Outside a small market in Amiens, France, in March. Mr. Macron quickly moved Monday to challenge Ms. Le Pen in the economically depressed north where he lost to her even in Amiens, his hometown.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesAfter five years of Mr. Macron, who trounced Ms. Le Pen in the 2017 runoff, the far-right leader emerged stronger than ever. She has softened her image in a successful process of “undemonizing’’ and focused relentlessly on ordinary voters’ economic hardship.In Yonne, Ms. Le Pen hammered away at the themes that carried her through to the second round. Meeting with a cereal farmer, she spoke of how rising prices of fuel and fertilizers following the war in Ukraine would raise the cost of staples at supermarkets and hurt the most vulnerable.The far right’s record performance on Sunday resulted from a combination of factors, including Ms. Le Pen’s own efforts to revamp her image, a successful cultural battle waged by conservative forces in recent years, and a series of Islamist attacks in France since 2015. But critics say that it also reflected Mr. Macron’s continued strategy of triangulating France’s electoral landscape. While Mr. Macron was regarded as a center-left candidate five years ago, he shifted rightward during his presidency, sensing that his main challenge would come from Ms. Le Pen. That shift was embodied by a series of laws toughening France’s stance on immigration, empowering the police, and combating Islamist extremism. Many working French also felt that his economic policies unfairly favored the rich and have left them more adrift.If Mr. Macron’s intention was to defuse Ms. Le Pen’s appeal by stripping her of her core issues, critics say the approach backfired by ushering the talking points of the far right deeper into the mainstream political debate. Then, Ms. Le Pen also shifted her message to pocketbook issues that have now resonated even more broadly as energy prices spike because of the war in Ukraine.Sacha Houlié, a lawmaker and a spokesman for Mr. Macron’s campaign, said that the president was aiming to strengthen the dam strategy. He acknowledged that there have been “some mistakes” and “blunders,” noting that some government ministers had picked up themes and expressions promoted by the far right. Supporters of Ms. Le Pen singing the national anthem at her rally after voting results were announced on Sunday. Mr. Macron has described the far-right leader as a danger to French democracy.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut Mr. Houlié denied that Mr. Macron had normalized far-right ideas, saying his government had mainly tried to respond to people’s growing concerns on crime and immigration. “We cannot sweep the dust under the carpet,” he said, referring to the issues. But many, especially Mr. Mélenchon’s supporters of the left, feel so betrayed that Mr. Macron may have a harder time in this next election persuading them to join his call for unity by building a dam against Ms. Le Pen, whom the president has called a danger to democracy. Alexis Lévrier, a historian who has written about Mr. Macron’s relations with the news media, said that as Mr. Macron tried to reshape French politics around a strict divide between his mainstream movement and Ms. Le Pen, he “contributed to the rise in power of the far right.” Unwittingly, “he’s a pyromaniac firefighter,” Mr. Lévrier said.A resident of Guyancourt — a well-off, left-leaning city southwest of Paris where Mr. Mélenchon came in first Sunday — Stéphanie Noury said that, in 2017, she gave Mr. Macron her vote as part of a dam against the far right. But this time, she planned to stay home for the final round.“Macron played into the hands of the extreme right,’’ said Ms. Noury, 55, a human resources manager who voted Sunday for Mr. Mélenchon. “He told himself that he would always win against the extreme right.’’Compared to 2017, Ms. Le Pen’s share of the first-round vote went up by a couple of percentage points despite the direct challenge of a new rival, the far-right TV pundit Éric Zemmour, who urged his supporters to vote for Ms. Le Pen in the upcoming showdown.On Sunday, Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Zemmour and a third far-right candidate, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, together got 32 percent of the vote. In 2017, Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Dupont-Aignan collected 26 percent in the first round.Ms. Le Pen meeting supporters at a rally in Stiring-Wendel, France, on April 1. The far-right candidate has sought to soften her image.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesVoters first formed a dam against the extreme right in 2002 when Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked the political establishment by making it into a runoff against Jacques Chirac. Another dam helped defeat Ms. Le Pen in 2017.To gain credibility on the right, in 2019, Mr. Macron gave his first long interview on the sensitive issues of immigration and Islam to Valeurs Actuelles, a magazine that straddles the right and far right.“By talking to us, Emmanuel Macron came to seek some legitimacy on these subjects, from right-wing people who felt he was doing nothing,” said Geoffroy Lejeune, the publication’s editor. “He knows that by doing this, he’s sending a big signal.” Aurélien Taché, a lawmaker once allied with Mr. Macron, said the president was elected in 2017 thanks to voters who put aside their political differences and united against Ms. Le Pen. He said Mr. Macron should have taken those votes — mainly from the left — into account in his policies afterward.“He did not consider them,” he said, adding that Mr. Macron instead worked to “set up this cleavage’’ between him and Ms. Le Pen, leading to a “high-risk rematch.”“There have been, on a whole range of topics, very strong concessions made to the far right,” Mr. Taché said, also citing tougher immigration rules and the application of a stricter version of French secularism, called laïcité.A migrant family waiting for emergency accommodation with a host family in front of the Paris City Hall last year. Some allies distanced themselves from Mr. Macron after he toughened his stance on immigration.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut Mr. Taché, who quit Mr. Macron’s party in 2020 over the president’s shift to the right, was especially critical of the government’s landmark law against separatism, which has been criticized inside and outside France, including by the U.S. envoy on international religious freedom. The law amounted to “making Islam and Muslims invisible,” Mr. Taché said. Some academics, political opponents and Muslim organizations have also criticized the law as discriminating against French Muslims by leading to the widespread closing of mosques, Muslim associations and schools.That resentment may now also complicate Mr. Macron’s dam-building effort. To be re-elected this time, for instance, he will have to persuade voters in places likes Trappes, a working-class city with a large Muslim population southwest of Paris, to join the dam against Ms. Le Pen. A longtime stronghold of Mélenchon supporters, Trappes strongly backed Mr. Macron in the 2017 runoff. But comments by voters Sunday suggested that the dam might not be as effective this time. Frédéric Renan, 47, a computer programmer, said he would abstain or cast a blank vote in a showdown between Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen.“Macron opened the door to the extreme right,’’ Mr. Renan said, adding that the president’s economic policies hurt the poor and fueled the rise of the far right. “I don’t see how voting for Macron is a vote in a dam against the extreme right,” he said. “Some people will say that not participating in the dam against the extreme right is irresponsible, that the threat of the extreme right is greater than what Emmanuel Macron proposes, but I’m not convinced.’’The Islamic Center of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in Trappes, a Paris suburb, on Sunday. To be re-elected, Mr. Macron will need to woo voters in places likes Trappes, a working-class city with a large Muslim population.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesAdèle Cordonnier More

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      Macron to Face Le Pen for President as French Gravitate Toward Extremes

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      President Emmanuel Macron and the hard-right leader Marine Le Pen will compete for a second time in a runoff on April 24.PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron will face Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, in the runoff of France’s presidential elections.With 92 percent of the ballots cast on Sunday counted, Mr. Macron, a centrist, was leading with about 27.4 percent of the vote to Ms. Le Pen’s 24.3 percent. Ms. Le Pen benefited from a late surge that reflected widespread disaffection over rising prices, security and immigration.With war raging in Ukraine and Western unity likely to be tested as the fighting continues, Ms. Le Pen’s strong performance demonstrated the enduring appeal of nationalist and xenophobic currents in Europe. Extreme parties of the right and left took some 51 percent of the vote, a clear sign of the extent of French anger and frustration.An anti-NATO and more pro-Russia France in the event of an ultimate Le Pen victory would cause deep concern in allied capitals, and could fracture the united trans-Atlantic response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.But Mr. Macron, after a lackluster campaign, will go into the second round as the slight favorite, having fared a little better than the latest opinion polls suggested. Some had shown him leading Ms. Le Pen by just two points.Marine Le Pen speaking after the first-round results were announced on Sunday.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesThe principled French rejection of Ms. Le Pen’s brand of anti-immigrant nationalism has frayed as illiberal politics have spread in both Europe and the United States. She has successfully softened her packaging, if not her fierce conviction that French people must be privileged over foreigners and that the curtain must be drawn on France as a “land of immigration.”Ms. Le Pen’s ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia are close, although she has scrambled in recent weeks to play them down. This month, she was quick to congratulate Viktor Orban, Hungary’s nationalist and anti-immigrant leader, on his fourth consecutive victory in parliamentary elections.“I will restore France to order in five years,” Ms. Le Pen declared to cheering supporters, appealing to all French people to join her in what she called “a choice of civilization” in which the “legitimate preponderance of French language and culture” would be guaranteed and full “sovereignty reestablished in all domains.”The choice confronting French people on April 24 was between “division, injustice and disorder” on the one hand, and the “rallying of French people around social justice and protection,” she said.Mr. Macron told flag-waving supporters: “I want a France in a strong Europe that maintains its alliances with the big democracies in order to defend itself, not a France that, outside Europe, would have as its only allies the populist and xenophobic International. That is not us.”He added: “Don’t deceive ourselves, nothing is decided, and the debate we will have in the next 15 days is decisive for our country and for Europe.”A polling station in Pontoise on Sunday.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesLast week, in an interview in the daily Le Parisien newspaper, Mr. Macron called Ms. Le Pen “a racist” of “great brutality.” Ms. Le Pen hit back, saying that the president’s remarks were “outrageous and aggressive.” She called favoring French people over foreigners “the only moral, legal and admissible policy.”The gloves will be off as they confront each other over the future of France, at a time when Britain’s exit from the European Union and the end of Angela Merkel’s long chancellorship in Germany have placed a particular onus on French leadership.Mr. Macron wants to transform Europe into a credible military power with “strategic autonomy.” Ms. Le Pen, whose party has received funding from a Russian and, more recently, a Hungarian bank, has other priorities.The runoff, on April 24, will be a repeat of the last election, in 2017, when Mr. Macron, then a relative newcomer to politics intent on shattering old divisions between left and right, trounced Ms. Le Pen with 66.9 percent of the vote to her 33.1 percent.The final result this time will almost certainly be much closer than five years ago. Polls taken before Sunday’s vote indicated Mr. Macron winning by just 52 percent to 48 percent against Ms. Le Pen in the second round. That could shift in the coming two weeks, when the candidates will debate for the first time in the campaign.Reflecting France’s drift to the right in recent years, no left-of-center candidate qualified for the runoff. The Socialist Party, long a pillar of postwar French politics, collapsed, leaving Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left anti-NATO candidate with his France Unbowed movement, to take third place with about 21 percent.Supporters of Mr. Macron in Paris on Sunday.James Hill for The New York TimesMs. Le Pen, who leads the National Rally, formerly the National Front, was helped by the candidacy of Éric Zemmour, a fiercely xenophobic TV pundit turned politician, who became the go-to politician for anti-immigrant provocation, which made her look more mainstream and innocuous. In the end, Mr. Zemmour’s campaign faded, and he took about 7 percent of the vote.Mr. Zemmour immediately called on his supporters to back Ms. Le Pen in the second round. “Opposing Ms. Le Pen there is a man who allowed 2 million immigrants to enter France,” Mr. Zemmour declared.The threatening scenario for Mr. Macron is that Mr. Zemmour’s vote will go to Ms. Le Pen, and that she will be further bolstered by the wide section of the left that feels betrayed or just viscerally hostile toward the president, as well as by some center-right voters for whom immigration is the core issue.More than half of French people — supporters of Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Zemmour and Mr. Mélenchon — now appear to favor parties that are broadly anti-NATO, anti-American and hostile to the European Union. By contrast, the broad center — Mr. Macron’s La République en Marche party, the Socialist Party, the center right Republicans and the Green Party — took a combined total of about 40 percent.These were numbers that revealed the extent of anxiety in France, and perhaps also the extent of distrust of its democracy. They will be more comforting to Ms. Le Pen than to Mr. Macron, even if Mr. Mélenchon said his supporters should not give “a single vote” to Ms. Le Pen.He declined, however, to endorse Mr. Macron.At Ms. Le Pen’s headquarters, Frederic Sarmiento, an activist, said, “She will benefit from a big transfer of votes,” pointing to supporters of Mr. Zemmour, but also some on the left who, according to polls, will support Ms. Le Pen in the second round.Immigrant families awaiting emergency accommodation outside the Paris city hall last April.Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times“I am very worried, it will be a very close runoff,” said Nicolas Tenzer, an author who teaches political science at Sciences Po university. “Many on the left will abstain rather than vote Macron.”Mr. Macron gained the immediate support for the second round of the defeated Socialist, Communist, Green and center-right candidates, but between them they amounted to no more than 15 percent of the first-round vote. He may also benefit from a late surge in support of the Republic in a country with bitter wartime experience of extreme-right rule.In the end, the election on Sunday came down to Mr. Macron against the extreme right and left of the political spectrum, a sign of his effective dismantlement of the old political order. Now built essentially around a personality — the restless president — French democracy does not appear to have arrived at any sustainable alternative structure.If the two runoff qualifiers are the same as in 2017, they have been changed by circumstances. Where Mr. Macron represented reformist hope in 2017, he is now widely seen as a leader who drifted to the right and a top-down, highly personalized style of government. The sheen is off him.On the place of Islam in France, on immigration controls and on police powers, Mr. Macron has taken a hard line, judging that the election would be won or lost to his right.Addressing his supporters after the vote Sunday, he said he wants a France that “fights resolutely against Islamist separatism” — a term he uses to describe conservative or radical Muslims who reject French values like gender equality — but also a France that allows all believers to practice their faiths.A polling place at the Versailles town hall.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesHis rightward shift had a cost. The center-left, once the core of his support, felt betrayed. To what extent the left will vote for him in the second round will be a main source of concern, as already reflected in Mr. Macron’s abrupt recent catch-up paeans to “fraternity,” “solidarity” and equality of opportunity.Throughout the campaign, Mr. Macron appeared disengaged, taken up with countless telephone calls to Mr. Putin that proved ineffectual.A comfortable lead in polls disappeared in recent weeks as resentment grew over the president’s detachment. He had struggled during the five years of his presidency to overcome an image of aloofness, learning to reach out to more people, only to suffer an apparent relapse in the past several weeks.Still, Mr. Macron steered the country through the long coronavirus crisis, brought unemployment to its lowest level in a decade and lifted economic growth. Doing so, he has convinced many French people that he has what it takes to lead and to represent France with dignity on the world stage.Ms. Le Pen, who would be France’s first woman president, is also seen differently. Now in her third attempt to become president — Jacques Chirac won in 1995 after twice failing — she bowed to reason (and popular opinion) on two significant fronts: dropping her prior vows to take France out of the European Union and the eurozone. Still, many of her proposals — like barring E.U. citizens from some of the same social benefits as French citizens — would infringe fundamental European treaties.The leader of the National Rally, formerly the National Front, toned down her language to look more “presidential.” She smiled a lot, opening up about her personal struggles, and she gave the impression of being closer to the day-to-day concerns of French people, especially with regard to sharply rising gas prices and inflation.But many things did not change. Her program includes a plan to hold a referendum that would lead to a change in the Constitution that would ban any policies that lead to “the installation on national territory of a number of foreigners so large that it would change the composition and identity of the French people.”She also wants to bar Muslim women from wearing head scarves and fine them if they do.Polling booths in Trappes on Sunday. The first round of voting saw the highest abstention rate in decades.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesThe abstention rate Sunday, at between about 26 and 28 percent, was several points above the last election. Not since 2002 has it been so high.This appeared to reflect disillusionment with politics as a change agent, the ripple effect of the war in Ukraine and lost faith in democracy. It was part of the same anger that pushed so many French people toward political extremes.Aurelien Breeden More

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      Emmanuel Macron Is Playing a Dangerous Game

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      In 2017, Emmanuel Macron was “a meteor born under a lucky star.” A former banker without experience in elective office, he benefited during his first presidential campaign from President François Hollande choosing not to seek re-election, while the conservative candidate and front-runner, François Fillon, faced an embezzlement charge.In 2022, the planets appeared to align once more, this time on account of international circumstances rather than national dynamics. As president of the European Union since January, Mr. Macron has enhanced his status as a legitimate interlocutor with Vladimir Putin, even if his attempts to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine have been unsuccessful. All opinion polls have shown Mr. Macron leading in Sunday’s first round of the presidential election, but his lead has been swiftly declining.In his first campaign, Mr. Macron claimed to be “neither left nor right,” a slogan that had seduced many who are weary of the old political divisions. Once elected, however, he quickly revealed what that meant in practice. Cutting taxes for the wealthy, shrinking the welfare state and hollowing out democracy, Mr. Macron drifted rightward, to the point of shocking some members of La République En Marche!, his party.Far from changing course, Mr. Macron appears to be doubling down. In recent months, his appeal to the right-wing electorate has become ever more explicit, orienting his platform around two of the right’s traditional themes — control of immigration and stiffening of secularism. It may deliver him another victory. But Mr. Macron is playing a dangerous game. By absorbing his opponents’ views into his own platform, he risks bringing about a political landscape hazardously skewed to the right.Among Mr. Macron’s first decisions in office was the abolition of the wealth tax and a flat tax on capital income, which benefited the rich. At the same time he pursued a reduction in the housing allowance for the poor and a reduction inpensions for retirees. Halfway through his first year in power, he had become the “president of the rich.” The image stuck, burnished by his reform of labor law, which limited workers’ rights and weakened representative organizations, curtailment of unemployment benefits and diminution of employers’ social security contributions.During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Macron did show a different face. Having ordered a lockdown of the population, he decided that the state would generously bail out companies, which salvaged many of them and avoided massive layoffs of workers. The act, though broadly in line with governments across Europe, was undoubtedly helpful. All the same, Mr. Macron’s first term tended unmistakably to widen inequalities, as shown in surveys.In parallel, there has been a disquieting democratic decline. During 46 of the past 78 months, France has been under a state of emergency, a record in Europe. It was declared by Mr. Hollande after the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, then under Mr. Macron at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Confronted with similar challenges, Germany never used such extreme measures. Moreover, two days before the end of the first state of emergency, at Mr. Macron’s initiative, various emergency statutes were integrated into the common law by his party-dominated Parliament. Since then, six laws restricting the rights of asylum seekers, protesters, prisoners, labor unions and nongovernmental organizations have been enacted.The prerogatives of the police have also significantly been expanded at the expense of the judiciary, notably for search warrants and stop-and-search. The permission to use guns by the police has increased. During the Yellow Vest movement, 2495 protesters were wounded, 30 lost one eye, five had their hand blown off. Asked about the damage caused by so-called sublethal weapons prohibited in most European countries, the president declared that speaking of repression or police violence was unacceptable under the rule of law.Mr. Macron’s combination of neoliberalism and authoritarianism has deepened inequality, diminished the welfare state, weakened democracy and aggravated the mistrust of politics, resulting in unprecedented abstention rates in regional elections, especially among the youth. Under the Fifth Republic, in place since 1958, it is a unique record.There is one domain in which Mr. Macron had raised more optimistic expectations: climate change. In 2018, Minister of Environment Nicolas Hulot detailed an ambitious plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 in accordance with the 2015 Paris Agreement. A year later, as it became clear that the administration was not complying with its objectives, the popular Mr. Hulot resigned in protest. A year later, Mr. Macron convened The Citizens’ Convention for the Climate to provide proposals to mitigate global warming, which he promised to follow. But his government abandoned some of the most significant ones and watered down others.Yet the most revealing sign of Mr. Macron’s political drift to the right has been his placing the control of immigration, implicitly from the South, and the regulation of religion, tacitly Islam, at the center of his politics.On immigration, Mr. Macron has become ever more hard-line. In the past five years, the unprecedented repression of migrants and refugees at the border with Italy, in informal camps around Paris and above all in the so-called jungles of Calais, from where exiles try to reach Britain, has been denounced by human rights organizations. As incoming president of the European Union, he announced that after the drowning of 27 people in the English Channel in November, border policing by the European agency Frontex should be reinforced, disregarding the higher risk for migrants.Earlier in 2021, Mr. Macron had a bill voted on by his parliamentary majority against the alleged “separatism” of Muslims, who have been deemed a threat to republican values. Criticized by religious groups and advocacy groups as an attack of civil liberties, this law has already allowed the government to dissolve several nongovernmental organizations.The xenophobic and Islamophobic notes in Mr. Macron’s policies may come as a surprise from a candidate whose constituency is mostly composed of middle- and upper-class voters as well as retirees for whom immigration and secularism rank far lower as priorities than purchasing power, the health system and the environment. But with the left candidate of La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, polling third in the first round, Mr. Macron appears to have assumed that he would win the presidential election on his right, against Républicains’ Valérie Pécresse, Reconquête’s Éric Zemmour, and above all, Rassemblement National’s Marine Le Pen, in second place, with a constituency attuned to her nationalist program.It’s been done before. In 2002, Jacques Chirac adopted a similar approach in a runoff against Jean-Marie Le Pen. Ahead of the vote, Le Pen warned that “voters always prefer the original to the copy.” He was wrong, and lost by about 60 percent. In mid-March, when his daughter Marine was polling between 16 and 22 percent behind Mr. Macron in the second round of the election, it seemed like his prediction would continue to fall short. But now, when the difference between the candidates has plummeted to as little as 2 percent, it looks close to coming true.During his 2017 campaign, Mr. Macron presented himself as a renovator of politics and a rampart against the far right. Today, he appears to be something very different: a traditional politician, offering a bridge to the far right. For a president who promised to remake France in his image, it is a worrying legacy.Didier Fassin, an anthropologist and physician, is the James D. Wolfensohn professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He works on moral and political issues and on crisis in contemporary societies. He is recently the author of “The Will to Punish,” “Life. A Critical User’s Manual,” and “Policing the City. An Ethnographic.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More